Draco in Remission
by awkward
Summary: Snape took Draco to a one room cabin somewhere very cold and very isolated. Possible effects of the events of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince on Draco Malfoy's life.


Snape took Draco to a one room cabin somewhere very cold and very isolated. He lay down on the only camp bed without so much as a glare, and promptly fell asleep. At least, Draco assumed he was asleep; he didn't get so close as to know for sure. There was a sagging, less than inviting armchair in the corner that was probably intended for him, but instead he sat in the darkest corner and stared at the angry mark on his arm. It wasn't the Mark, but it felt suitably representative. Four long bruises from Snape's fingers coloured his skin. They were faint, but Draco had spent enough time looking at his forearm, imagining it tattooed with honour and success, to see them even in the shadows.

Draco didn't realise he'd fallen asleep until Snape woke him the next morning, nudging him with his shoe. Clearly he didn't want to catch Draco's cowardice; his eyes said as much, gazing down his long, long nose. Draco watched blearily as his ex-Professor showed him a cupboard of dusty soup tins and pointed out the window to a cluster of straggly-looking trees that were to serve as his toilet. Draco was rubbing his eyes and beginning to stand, with great assistance from the wall, as Snape stepped into the doorway.

"Not so much as a spark from your wand, or you're dead," Snape said, and Draco wanted to add 'like Dumbledore' but he didn't trust himself with keeping his hysteria out of his voice, even this early in the morning. And then Snape was gone, and Draco was _really_ alone, and he absolutely refused to cry. He took his wand out of his pocket, because magic was an instinct, and he didn't have a choice but to trust Snape's words. Blinking furiously, he pulled the chair (which was a hideous Gryffindor red, but Hogwarts was behind him now) and curled up to wait, and watch.

* * *

The tins of soup were almost all tomato, which Draco hated. He ate the only chicken noodle on the first day, and then set a battered-looking cream of mushroom aside with his wand. Beyond the soup tins, camp bed and armchair, the cabin contained a small pot that looked to have been used as a football, a rust-encrusted sink and a pot-belly stove that probably wasn't originally black. When Draco turned on the tap, he was surprised to get a thin stream of only slightly-brown water, but he wasn't brave enough to try to use the stove without his wand. 

After three days of cold, watered-down tomato soup, he set out to find herbs or roots from the surrounding land. He came back with a sickly dandelion, which he knew you could make alcohol from, so possibly it was edible; and a fistful of grass, which he was very uncertain about. In the end, it was a wasted tin of soup.

Hungry and not just a little cold, Draco settled back into the ugly chair to stare out the window. The only part of the view that changed was the clouds, though even they always remained grey and sullen. His dreams always started with the low clouds drifting across the window, as he always fell asleep watching them. And then they would swirl and change, and he would wake suddenly to a new set of clouds.

* * *

Draco began to count time in empty soup tins. He couldn't call them days, as he sometimes ate two in a day, or couldn't bring himself to eat, or just saved half the soup for a meal later. He stacked the empty tins in a neatly growing pyramid, and used this as a spotty sort of calendar. There were five tins when he made grass soup, ten the day he tried to _incendio_ himself a fire using a rotting branch, and twenty-five when he saw a new speck steadily growing larger in the sky out the window. 

Draco curled into a ball in the corner, not quite sure how he'd gotten under the camp bed. It was useless, anyway, as whoever was coming to kill him could probably hear his heaving breaths already. Then he saw the half-full bowl of tomato sludge sitting in the middle of the room, and tears were running down his cheeks, and his lungs were full of dust, and nothing was happening. He held himself as tensely as he could, digging his nails deep into his palms and his teeth into his lip and didn't move at all. His heart was beating loud enough to drown out the breaths that would have been deafening if he had been breathing at all.

Then there was knocking at the door, which made no sense because murderers aren't polite. He somehow held in a tiny whimper, maybe because of the hand over his mouth, and then the door was opening. Surely the world ought to have been spinning a bit more.

But it wasn't, because the murderer was wearing red shoes, and it was Pansy's voice calling his name. Draco let out the whimper (which was less tiny than he'd hoped) and Pansy pulled the camp bed away from over him, and he'd never had such a comforting hug in his life.


End file.
